Patrick Bateman: I'm fucking serious. It's fucking over, us, this is no joke. I don't think we should see each other any more. Evelyn Williams: But your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends. I really don't think it would work. You h...
Waiter #1: Our pasta this evening is squid ravioli in a lemon grass broth with goat cheese profiteroles, and I also have an arugula Caesar salad. For entrees this evening, I have swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade, rare roasted partridge breast ...
Toby Radloff: How long are you going to be in Delaware? Because I'd really like to see this movie with you. Harvey Pekar: I don't know. I'll be gone about a week. But I'm getting married, so I'll have to bring her along too. Is it a girl flick? Toby ...
Head Nazi: White men! White women! The swastika is calling you. The sacred and ancient symbol of your race, since the beginning of time. The Jew is using The Black as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless. Well, what are you going to do...
The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking...
More than Iran's enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption... a senior official in an important American political center said: 'Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.' He is right....
I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it...
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, bu...
In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing colla...
I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it...
That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry mo...
Gjerji raises his hand. In English he says, "I like to tell in the words of a great American philosopher what freedom is." "Say it in your language to your peers," I urge. Gyerji makes his statement. The class grows silent and thoughtful; there is mu...
The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don...
God’s side is determined not by geography, but by those who do His will. If Germans, English, Japanese, and Americans prayed right, they would all be praying for the same intention: Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. And what is that Wil...
WARMING UP TO the crèche turned out to be easy. Warming up to the other mothers there isn’t. I’m aware that Anglo-American-style instant bonding between women doesn’t happen in France. I’ve heard that female friendships here start out slowly...
The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be rei...
There was a loud shuffling above. A line of redcoats took their position at the edge of the ravine and aimed down at the rebels. "Present!" the British officer screamed to his men. "Present!" yelled the American officer. His men brought the butts of ...
White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to ...
My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ...
As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift. In sensing our responsibility to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity, let students and patriotic people ever keep in mind the warning...
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I h...
